Piece of the Ark
By Carol Boutard
May 5, 2025
May 5, 2025
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On this late afternoon
It’s still light enough to see the woodchuck dragging landscape fabric to pad its den under the workshop, clumps of turf still attached. We watch this from the porch as a thin September sun presses its smooth cheek against my skin. The air has changed, as if fall has put her palm down and stopped what had been spinning since June— it tastes earthier since the rain, having passed through the lungs of the forest, with fresh notes of duff and spore. Everywhere around us signs of ingathering, ours as well— you found a fallen tree whose roots had grown around a rock. You hauled the tree away, but saved this stump as if it were a piece of the ark. I found the tiny skull of a fawn, silvered into driftwood, fir needles and bits of moss sheltered in its crevices. It sits indoors now, losing some of its shimmer on the bookcase shelf. The garden is furious with ripening— Peppers and tomatoes tug their stems to the ground. Pole beans have expanded into huge pods gravid with seed, all flowers turning to production, each ovule a tight locket, storing next year’s spring. The weather feels personal now, a tap on my shoulder, as I witness nature order herself, everything mortal coming towards its own autumn and I am unprepared, unprepared for these shorter days— I’m like the emerald fly looking for sugar, circling at the bottom of my glass. |
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After 25 years of a farming life in Oregon’s Willamette Valley, Carol Boutard and her husband have relocated to Penn Yan, a village in the Finger Lakes of Upstate New York. Our land was once the heart of a dairy farm and still has its large barn, silo and milk house. Among other creatures, it is home to the magnificent and charming native marmots as well as birds, deer, foxes and skunks.
Find her on Instagram at @carolineboutard5. |
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Author’s Note:
I was startled by the juxtaposition of my life’s partnership of almost fifty years with aspects of fall’s natural decline. This poem is the result.